1940s Abstract Paintings

Genre: Modern Subject: Abstract Medium: Oil Surface: Board Dimensions: 16" x 19 3/4" x 1/4" Dimensions w/Frame: 19 1/4" x 23 1/4" Ernesto Linares Early Mexican Modernist Abstract...

signed ‘Gropper’ (lower right); with the artist's studio stamp (on the verso)

Antique American modernist abstract painting. Watercolor, and pastel on paper. Framed. Signed. Image size, 6.5H by 10L

Vintage American modernist abstract drawing. Pencil and graphite on paper, circa 1970. Unsigned. Image size, 31L x 23H. Housed in a period frame.

Antique American modernist abstract oil painting by Arnold Aaron Friedman (1874 - 1946). Oil on canvas. Signed on verso. Framed.

Antique American abstract minimalist painting. Oil and gouache on paper, circa 1950. Housed in a period frame. Image size, 22L x 30H.

"Salutations" is a 12 x 16 inches, oil on canvas painting by American modernist and surrealist, female artist Peter Miller. The work is painted in a vibrant color palette. The painti...

Na Kumuwaiwai Hohonu, Underwater Spirt - Hawaiian Symbolist Figurative Hawaiian symbolist nocturnal figurative of glowing whispy figure underwater with mountains and red coral garden by Marguerite Louis Blasingame (American; 1906-1947), circa 1940-45. Marguerite and her husband Frank Blasingame...

Juanita Guccione (1904 - 1999) Study for Ladders, 1948 Gouache on paper 17 x 13 inches Signed lower left, dated, and inscribed “Study for Oil Painting...

Vintage modernist abstract hat shop painting. Oil on canvas, circa 1950. Housed in a period frame. Image size, 32L x 26H.

Vintage modernist still life painting by Virginia Tillou (1906 - 1995). Oil canvas. Housed in a period Heydenryk frame. Image size, 12L x 18H. Sig...

Erik Ortvad (Danish, 1917 - 2008) Abstract Landscape, 1946 Oil on canvas Signed and dated lower right 32 X 37.5 inches 35 x 40.5 inches, framed Born in 1917 in Copenhagen, Erik Ortvad was a surrealist painter and a founding member of the COBRA art...

Vintage modernist abstract expressionist painting. Oil on canvas. Housed in a period frame. Image size, 24L x 36H. Signed.

Signed lower left, 'Hortense M. Gordon' for Hortense Crompton Mattice Gordon (Canadian, 1886-1961) and dated 1949. Previously with: Dominion Gallery of Montreal (stamp, verso). Phot...

Antique American school signed seascape painting. Oil on board. Signed. Framed. Image size, 24L x 18H.

Casein on board, signed lower right. 22 x 29.5 inches; 33 x 39.5 inches framed. Provenance: Paul Burlin Art Trust Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, ...

Charles Green Shaw Harvard vs. Yale, 1944 Signed and dated on the reverse Oil on canvasboard 9 x 12 inches Provenance: Harvey and Francois Rambach, New Jersey Private Collection, California Washburn Gallery, New York D. Wigmore Fine Art, New York Private Collection, New York Charles Green Shaw, born into a wealthy New York family, began painting when he was in his mid-thirties. A 1914 graduate of Yale, Shaw also completed a year of architectural studies at Columbia University. During the 1920s Shaw enjoyed a successful career as a freelance writer for The New Yorker, Smart Set and Vanity Fair, chronicling the life of the theater and café society. In addition to penning insightful articles, Shaw was a poet, novelist and journalist. In 1927 he began to take a serious interest in art and attended Thomas Hart Benton's class at the Art Students League briefly in New York. He also studied privately with George Luks, who became a good friend. Once he had dedicated himself to non-traditional painting, Shaw's writing ability made him a potent defender of abstract art. After initial study with Benton and Luks, Shaw continued his artistic education in Paris by visiting numerous museums and galleries. From 1930 to 1932 Shaw's paintings evolved from a style imitative of Cubism to one directly inspired by it, though simplified and more purely geometric. Returning to the United States in 1933, Shaw began a series of abstracted cityscapes of skyscrapers he called Manhattan Motifs which evolved into his most famous works, the shaped canvases he called Plastic Polygons. The 1930s were productive years for Shaw. He showed his paintings in numerous group exhibitions, both in New York and abroad, and was also given several one-man exhibitions. Shaw had his first one-man exhibition at the Valentine Dudensing Gallery in New York in 1934, which included 25 Manhattan Motif paintings and 8 abstract works. In the spring of 1935 Shaw was introduced to Albert Gallatin and George L.K. Morris. Gallatin was so impressed with Shaw's work, he broke a policy against solo exhibitions at his museum, the Gallery of Living Art, and offered Shaw an exhibition there. In the summer of 1935 Shaw traveled to Paris with Gallatin and Morris who provided introductions to many great painters. Shaw regularly spent time with John Ferren and Jean Hélion. The following year Gallatin organized an exhibition called Five Contemporary American Concretionists at the Reinhardt Gallery that included Shaw, Ferren, and Morris, Alexander Calder, and Charles Biederman...

Original vintage 1940s Modernist Landscape painting of Red Rocks Park, Colorado by Vance Kirkland (1904-1981). Titled, "Ed (Hicks) Sketching at Red Rocks". This regionalist mountain landscape painting is set near Red Rocks Park, Morrison, Colorado (just west of Denver). The figure in the painting is of Kirkland's friend, Ed Hicks. Watercolor on paper, signed and dated, January 1943, lower left and titled verso by the artist. Painted in colors of red, brown, blue, and green. Presented in a custom gold leaf frame, outer dimensions measure 34 ¾ x 42 ⅞ x 1 ¼ inches. Painting as shown within the mat and frame measures 21 x 29 inches. Provenance: Private Collection, Denver, Colorado About the Artist: Variously referred to as the “Father of Modern Colorado Painting,” “Dean of Colorado Artists” and “Colorado’s pre-eminent artist,” Kirkland was an inventive, visionary painter who spent fifty-two years of his fifty-four year career in Denver. Of the approximately 1,200 paintings he created, about 550 from the first half of his career (1927-1953) are water-based media: acquarelle, gouache, casein and egg tempera, with a few oils. In the latter half of his career (1953-1981) he used oil and his unique oil and water mixture. He also produced five hundred drawings and some ten prints, mostly lithographs on stone, while also engaged in teaching full-time for most of the period. To show people “something they have never seen before and new ways to look at things,” he felt he needed to preserve his artistic freedom. Consequently, he chose to spend his entire professional career in Denver far removed from the established American art centers in the East and Midwest. “By minding my own business and working on my own,” he said, “I think it was possible to develop in this part of the country… I’ve developed my kind of work [and] I think my paintings are stronger for having worked that way.” The geographical isolation resulting from his choice to stay in Colorado did not impede his creativity, as it did other artists, but in fact contributed to his unique vision. The son of a dentist, who was disappointed with his [son’s] choice of art as a career, Kirkland flunked freshman watercolor class in 1924 at the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art) for putting colors into his landscapes that did not exist in nature and for competing colors. Not dissuaded, he won first prize for his watercolors in his junior and senior years. [While in Cleveland,] he studied with three influential teachers. Henry Keller, included in the prestigious New York Armory Show in 1913, introduced him to designed realism which he later used in his Colorado landscapes in the 1930s and 1940s. His other teachers were Bill Eastman, who studied with Hans Hofmann and appreciated all the new movements in modern art, and Frank Wilcox, a fine watercolorist. While a student at the Cleveland School of Art, Kirkland concurrently took liberal arts courses at Western Reserve and the Cleveland School of Education and taught two freshman courses in watercolor and design, receiving his diploma in painting from the school in 1927 by doing four years of work in three. The following year he received a Bachelor of Education in Art degree from the same institution. In 1929 he assumed the position of founding director of the University of Denver’s School of Art, originally known as the Chappell School of Art. He resigned three years later when the university reneged on its agreement to grant its art courses full recognition toward a Bachelor of Arts degree. His students prevailed on him to continue teaching, resulting in the Kirkland School of Art which he opened in 1932 at 1311 Pearl Street in Denver. The building, where he painted until his death in 1981, formerly was the studio of British-born artist, Henry Read, designer of the City of Denver Seal and one of the original thirteen charter members of the Artists’ Club of Denver, forerunner of the Denver Art Museum. The Kirkland School of Art prospered for the next fourteen years with its courses accredited by the University of Colorado Extension Center in Denver. The teaching income from his art school and his painting commissions helped him survive the Great Depression. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts commissioned from him two post office murals, Cattle Roundup (1938, Eureka, Kansas), and Land Rush (1940, Sayre, Oklahoma). He also did murals for several Denver clients: the Gerald Hughes mansion (1936, later demolished), Arthur Johnson home (1936-37, Seven Drinks of Man), Albany Hotel (1937, later demolished), Neustetter’s Department Store (1937, “History of Costume,” three of five saved in 1987 before the building interior was demolished in advance of its condo conversion), and the Denver Country Club (1945, partially destroyed and later painted over). In 1953 the Ford Times, published by the Ford Motor Company, commissioned Kirkland along with fellow Denver artists, William Sanderson and Richard Sorby, to paint six watercolors each for the publication. Their work appeared in articles [about] Colorado entitled, “Take to the High Road” (of the Colorado Rockies) by Alicita and Warren Hamilton. Kirkland sketched the mountain passes and high roads in the area of Mount Evans, Independence Pass near Aspen, and Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. In 1946 Kirkland closed his art school when the University of Denver rehired him as director of its School of Art and chairman of the Division of Arts and Humanities. In 1957...

This beautiful oil on linen canvas painting, entitled "Rail Crossing: Middletown, was executed by the esteemed artist Jules Halfant (American, 1909-2001)...

Vintage modernist abstract expressionist painting. Oil on board. Housed in a period frame. Image size, 16L x 20H. Signed.

In Byron Brown's "The Night Journey", 1947, Picasso meets Jackson Pollock. Here Brown strikes a balance between fanciful representation and abstraction. ...

Vintage American modernist abstract piano painting. Oil on canvas, circa 1940. Signed. Framed. Image size, 24"L x 20"H.

Print engraving, soft ground and scouper on paper; ed. 45/50 24 x 20 inches; 26.25 x 23 inches framed Signed and dated lower center, "SW Hayter 47", titled in pencil lower center Pro...

Abstract landscape, oil painting This is hand signed lower right dated 1947 There is also a hand written inscription in french lower left. Moussia Toulman ( 1903-1997), Artist and poet, was born in Uman Ukraine (famed as the tomb site of Chassidic Rebbe Nachman of Breslov) and came to Israel (British mandate Palestine) when she was 19 years old. Just a few months after her arrival she married, settled in Metula however, she didn’t forgo her ambition to study art. In 1923 she enrolled to study at the Bezalel Art Institute in Jerusalem and completed her studies there in 1926. Like Ziona Tagar, who preceded her a few years earlier, Moussia Toulmann chose to become an artist-woman in the full significance of the term. She wasn’t satisfied with the local studies framework that was available and chose to continue her studies in Paris, France which at that time was considered the art capital. From 1929 onwards Musia lived in Paris, studied art and joined the ‘Independent Salon’ society. She made contacts with artists and writers and exhibited during the 1930’s in a number of select group exhibitions. In 1936 Tolman visited Israel and forged bonds with artists she studied with at Betzalel, among them Aharon Avni, Gliksberg and Avigdor Stematsky. She exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1936 in a group exhibition with Aharon Avni, Arie Aroch, Yosef Zaritsky, Mordechai Levanon, Eliyahu Sigad, Chaya Schwartz, and Yehezkel Streichman. She painted landscapes and portraits and presented one of the works she painted in Paris to the Tel Aviv museum. It was a portrait of the poet and art critic Gustave Kahn who had died the same year. Moussia returned to Paris and exhibited a one-man show just before the outbreak of the Second World War. During the war all the works she exhibited in this exhibition were lost without a trace and Moussia Toulman herself wandered around France moving from one hiding place to another. After the war, in 1946 Moussia Toulman continued painting but was reluctant to exhibit her works. She became a well-known public figure and volunteered for aid programmes for Holocaust survivors, especially orphans. Later on she founded together with Mane Katz, Jacques Atlan and other artists the ‘Art’ organization with the object of developing cultural ties with Israel and to aid Israeli artists during their stay in Paris. In addition to painting Moussia Toulman wrote poetry, published articles and was involved in art criticism. She was included in the rare publication of 'Association des artistes, peintres et sculpteurs juifs de France' in French and Yiddish. The School of Paris Jewish artists included Edmond Kayser, Abram Krol, Meyer Lazar, David Lan-Bar, Jacques Lipchitz, Jacques Loutchansky, Lubitch, Rene Mendes-France, Adolphe Milich, Lea Nikel, Jules Pascin, David Peretz, Camille Pissarro, Nathan Rapoport, Moussia Toulman, Roger Worms...

Vintage modernist still life painting. Oil on canvas. Housed in a period frame. Image size, 14L x 8H. Signed.

Antique American modernist oil painting by Harry Lane. Oil on canvas, circa 1940. Signed. Exhibited. Framed. Image size, 20L x 16H.

Antique American modernist landscape oil painting. Oil on canvas, circa 1940. Signed illegibly lower left. Image size, 36L x 24H. Housed in a period modern frame.

A Painting depicting an amusement park exploding in vibrant colors. The painting is signed "William Wright" lower right. Oil on Canvas. 20 x 24. Nicely framed.

Signed Lower Right Vaclav Vytlacil (1892-1984) He was born to Czechoslovakian parents in 1892 in New York City. Living in Chicago as a youth, he took classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, returning to New York when he was 20. From 1913 to 1916, he enjoyed a scholarship from the Art Students League, and worked with John C. Johansen (a portraitist whose expressive style resembled that of John Singer Sargent), and Anders Zorn. He accepted a teaching position at the Minneapolis School of Art in 1916, remaining there until 1921. This enabled him to travel to Europe to study Cézanne’s paintings and works of the Old Masters. He traveled to Paris, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, and Munich seeking the works of Titian, Cranach, Rembrandt, Veronese, and Holbein, which gave him new perspective. Vytlacil studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, settling there in 1921. Fellow students were Ernest Thurn and Worth Ryder, who introduced him to famous abstractionist Hans Hofmann. He worked with Hofmann from about 1922 to 1926, as a student and teaching assistant. During the summer of 1928, after returning to the United States, Vytlacil gave lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, on modern European art. Soon thereafter, he became a member of the Art Students League faculty. After one year, he returned to Europe and successfully persuaded Hofmann to teach at the League as well. He spent about six years in Europe, studying the works of Matisse, Picasso, and Dufy. In 1935, he returned to New York and became a co-founder of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936. He later had teaching posts at Queens College in New York; the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California; Black Mountain College in North Carolina; and the Art Students League. His paintings exhibit a clear inclination toward modernism. His still lives and interiors from the 1920s indicate an understanding of the art of Cézanne. In the 1930s, his works displayed two very different kinds of art at the same time. His cityscapes and landscapes combine Cubist-inspired spatial concerns with an expressionistic approach to line and color. Vytlacil also used old wood, metal, cork, and string in constructions, influenced by his friend and former student, Rupert Turnbull. He eventually ceased creating constructions as he considered them too limiting. The spatial challenges of painting were still his preference. During the 1940s and 1950s, his works indicated a sense of spontaneity not felt in his earlier work. He married Elizabeth Foster in Florence, Italy, in 1927 and they lived and worked in Positano, Italy for extended periods of time. Later on, they divided their time between homes in Sparkill, New York and Chilmark, Massachusetts, where Vyt, as he was affectionately called, taught at the Martha's Vineyard Art...

Charles Bunnell original vintage 1941 signed painting from the artist's Black and Blue Series, Abstract Structure style. Watercolor, Ink and Charcoal on paper in colors of black, wh...

"Ortez (Modernist Family Portrait)" is a gouache on paper abstract painting by Lewis Lee Tilley (1921-2005) from 1947 of five family members sitting on a couch. Painted in jewel tone...

Antique American modernist landscape painting. Oil on canvas, circa 1930. Signed. Housed in period frame. Image size 45L x 32H.

Antique modernist abstract painting by Elsie Orfuss (Born 1913). Oil on canvas. Signed on verso. Nicely framed. Image size, 36L x 48H

Vintage American modernist still life painting. Oil on canvas, circa 1950. No signature found. Framed. Image size, 21"L x 13"H.

Oil on canvas painting from 1946 by Colorado/Woodstock modernist Jenne Magafan (1916-1952) titled 'Deserted Street'. Single figure portrayed in a ghost town with buildings and teleph...

Watercolor on paper painting by Eve (Van Ek) Drewelowe titled "The Champagne Cascades, Crescendos, Crashes" from 1945. An abstract landscape scene of a waterfall with white, yellow, and black. Presented in a custom gold frame, outer dimensions measure 43 ¾ x 33 ¾ x ½ inches. Image size is 29 ¾ x 19 ¾ inches. Painting is clean and in very good vintage condition - please contact us for a detailed condition report. Provenance: Private collection, Denver, Colorado Expedited and international shipping is available - please contact us for a quote. About the Artist: A painter and sculptor, Eve Drewelowe was the eighth of twelve children and grew up on a farm with a tomboyish spirit. Her farm duties did not permit her to take art classes in her youth that she later felt would have hindered the development of her artistic style. Although her father died when she was eleven, he imparted to her reverence for nature and a true love of the earth, values later reflected in her western oil and watercolor landscapes. She attended the University of Iowa at Iowa City on scholarship, receiving her B.A. degree in graphic and plastic arts in 1923. After graduation and against the advice of her art professor, Charles Atherton Cumming who believed that matrimony ended a woman’s painting career, she married fellow student Jacob Van Ek. While he pursued his doctorate in political science, she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Iowa for her M.A. degree in painting and the history of art. At that time her alma mater was one of the few universities in the United States offering an advanced fine arts degree, and she was its first graduate, receiving her degree in 1924. That year the Van Eks moved to Boulder, Colorado, where Jacob had obtained a position as an assistant professor at the University of Colorado. Five years later he became the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, a position he held until 1959. Eve briefly studied at the University. In 1927 and 1928 she taught part-time at the University’s School of Engineering and a decade later summer courses (1936 and 1937) in the University’s Department of Fine Arts. In 1926 she became a charter member of the Boulder Artists Guild and participated in its inaugural exhibition. Like many American artists of her generation, she helped foster an art tradition outside the established cultural centers in the East and Midwest. Her professional career spanning six decades largely was spent in and around Boulder. There she produced more than 1,000 works of art in oil, watercolor, pen and ink, and other media in styles of impressionism, regionalism, and abstraction. She devoted a considerable part of her work to Colorado, Wyoming, and Arizona subject matter depicting colorful and fantastic landscapes pulsating with energy and untouched by humans. Excited by what she saw, the wide open spaces made her feel like a modern-day pioneer. In discussing her work, she once said, “What really motivated me in my youth, in my growth, in maturity was my desire to captivate everything. I put on canvas an eagerness to possess the wonder of nature and beauty of color and line – to encompass everything, not to let anything escape.” Before World War II she and her husband took two international trips that had far-reaching consequences for her career, exposing her to the arts and cultures of countries in Asia and Europe. The first in 1928-29 was an extensive excursion in the Far East for which her husband had received a scholarship to study and report on the socioeconomics of Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and India. The year after their return she had her first solo show at the University of Colorado’s library gallery. Discussing the twenty-six oils and sixteen ink drawings on view representing sixteen different countries, the Christian Science Monitor reviewer noted: “The pictures have a wide range and are far from being stereotyped in subject matter, being personal in choice. The ink-brush drawings are spontaneous, well balanced, and striking in their masses, giving the sense of having been done on the spot.” Her second trip with her husband and a party from the Bureau of University Travel had a four-month itinerary that included England, Denmark, Finland, Russia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and France. It yielded seventeen oils and twenty-six ink-wash drawings which she exhibited in a February 1936 solo show at the Boulder Art Association Gallery. Her creative output in the 1930s attracted the attention of the critic for the Parisian Revue des Arts whose observations were translated and printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on June 10, 1937: To present our readers Eve Van Ek [at that time she signed her work with her married name] …is to give them an opportunity to admire a talent of multiple aspects. The eclecticism of her art passes from a rich skill in forceful oil painting of fine strokes of precision best seen perhaps in her treatment of mountain subjects, of craggy cliffs hewn as in nature, through pen and ink or lithographic crayon design, water color, and occasionally embroidery and sculpture, to the delicate perfection of detail of the miniature. The lofty mountains of Colorado have supplied her with extremely interesting subjects for study; she knows how to represent in an entirely personal way the varying scenes and the curious restlessness of the terrain. While pursuing her art, she also was a dean’s wife. The responsibilities attached to that position proved too restrictive, contributing to a grave illness. She underwent an operation in 1940 at the Mayo Clinic for a gastric polyp, a dangerous procedure at that time. Although she had expected to come back to Boulder “in a box,” the surgery proved successful. Depicting her painful hospital stay in a watercolor, Reincarnation, she reflected on the transformative experience of piecing her life back together. That October she received encouragement from the review of her solo exhibition at the Argent Gallery in New York written by Howard Devree, art critic for the New York Times who said: “The whole exhibition is stimulating…Boats, fences and even flowers in the canvases of Eve Van Ek…seem struggling endlessly to escape from the confines of the frame.” Her watercolor, Crosses, Central City (1940), illustrates her work described in the New York review. The composition pulsates with energy conveyed by the modernist technique of juxtaposing the scene’s various angles, distorting the shapes and positions of the structures, additionally highlighting them with bright colors. The telephone poles at various angles represent crosses figuratively marking a Way of the Cross symbolized by the wooden stairs...

"Hope is all we have but if we believe it is enough" A statement piece and graphic painting full of emotion and color by Jae Carmichel (1925-2005) Jae Carmichael, painter, sculptor, photographer, writer, and independent filmmaker. She was the founding director of Pasadena's Pacific Asia Museum. She staged more than 200 solo exhibitions in galleries in Los Angeles, Japan, and Europe and has works included in permanent collections of the Oakland Museum of California, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. She studied art with Francis de Erdely, Millard, Sheets, Phil...

Work on cardboard Golden wooden frame 41 x 50.5 x 6 cm

Vintage Paris School signed original oil painting. Oil on board, circa 1950. Signed illegibly. Displayed in a period wood frame. Image, 12"L x 16"H.

A vibrant, Miro like work celebrating his exhibition at the famous Kootz gallery. This piece serves as historical work and and artistic expression of joie de vivre! In 1947 Hans Ho...

Richard Andres (American, 1927-2013) Untitled, c. 1949 oil on canvas 18 x 32 inches Richard Andres was born in Buffalo, New York in 1927. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1950, he was immediately drafted and served for two years in the army as a mural painter. He received his Master of Arts from Kent State in 1961. A frequent exhibitor at galleries and museums and winner of multiple May Show prizes, Andres taught art in the Cleveland Public Schools for 28 years, as well as teaching the University of Buffalo, the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Western Reserve University. Very little in Richard Andres’ childhood would have predicted his love of classical music, mid-century-modern architecture and certainly not his lifelong passion for art and in particular abstract art. Richard’s father, Raymond, had no more than a third-grade education, and his mother, Clara, was one of thirteen children – only three of whom lived into adulthood and none of whom attended high school. They lived, when Richard was a boy, in a dingy area of Buffalo, NY in a walk-up apartment situated above a tavern. Raymond and Clara supplemented the income from their factory jobs in the bar downstairs with Raymond playing ragtime on the piano and Clara serving drinks. This often left Richard and his two older brothers at home alone to fend for themselves. The two older boys, Raymond and Russell, were - unlike Richard- rather rough and tumble and entertained themselves with stickball, boxing and the like. Richard, on the other hand, from a very young age liked to draw, or better yet even, to paint with the small set of watercolors he received for Christmas one year. Paper, however, at the height of the depression, was hard to come by. Luckily, Clara used paper doilies as decoration for the apartment and Richard would contentedly paint and then cut up doilies, gluing the pieces together to create collages. At eight-years-old, he discovered the Albright-Knox Museum (then known as the Albright Art Gallery) and spent several hours a week there studying the paintings. He was particularly fond of Charles Burchfield‘s landscapes, enamored with their ‘messiness’ and thinking that they somehow captured more ‘feeling’ than works he was previously familiar with. For his tenth Christmas, he asked for and received a ‘how-to’ paint book by Elliot O’Hare. Through this self-teaching, he assembled the portfolio needed for acceptance to Buffalo Technical High School where he studied Advertising Arts. In his Junior year, he was encouraged to enter a watercolor painting, “Two Barns,” in the national 1944-45 Ingersoll Art Award Contest and was one of twelve grand prize winners – each one winning one hundred dollars. More importantly the painting was exhibited at the Carnegie Institute Galleries, which resulted in his winning a national scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art (The Cleveland Art Institute). He flourished at the art school under the tutelage of faculty members such as Carl Gaertner, as well as that of visiting artists such as William Sommer and Henry George Keller. He would say in later years that Gaertner, in particular, influenced his attitude toward life as well as art. “Gaertner,” Andres said, “believed that there was no need to be a ‘tortured artist’, that an artist should rather enjoy beauty, family, and life in general.” Free to spend his days as he chose, he wandered the Cleveland Art Museum for most of the hours he was not attending classes or painting; the remaining time was spent drinking coffee at a local hangout with art school friends – which is where he met fellow Henry Keller scholarship winner, Avis Johnson. Richard was immediately smitten with Avis, but being rather shy, it took him the entire summer of 1948 to build up his courage to ask her out. Over that summer he ‘thought about Avis’ and worked in a diner to save money. He also used the hundred-dollar prize money won in High School to visit the first Max Beckmann retrospective in the United States at the City Art Museum in St. Louis. Over a half century later he spoke of that exhibit with a reverence usually reserved for spiritual matters, “I walked in and it was like nothing I had ever seen before... the color...It just glowed.” Returning to campus in the Fall, the first thing he did was go to the coffee shop in hopes of finding Avis. He did, and she, upon seeing him, realized that she was also smitten with him. They quickly became known as ‘the couple’ on campus, and a year later, with Richard being drafted for the Korean war, they were quickly married by a Justice of the Peace, celebrating after with family at Avis’s Cleveland home. As a gift, faculty member John Paul Miller designed and made the simple gold wedding ring Avis wore for their 65 years of marriage. During those 65 years neither wavered in their mutual love, nor in the respect they shared for one another’s art. The couple lived in a converted chicken coop in Missouri while Richard was in boot camp. At the camp, he would volunteer for any job offered and one of those jobs ended up being painting road signs. His commander noticed how quickly and neatly he worked and gave him more painting work to do - eventually recommending him for a position painting murals for Army offices in Panama. Until her dying day, Avis remained angry that “The army got to keep those fabulous murals and they probably didn’t even know how wonderful they were.” In Panama, their first son, Mark, was born. After Richard’s discharge in 1953, they moved back to the Cleveland area and used the GI bill to attend Kent State gaining his BA in education. The small family then moved briefly to Buffalo, where Richard taught at the Albright Art School and the University of Buffalo – and their second son, Peter, was born. Richard had exhibited work in the Cleveland May Show and the Butler Art Museum during his art school years, and during the years in Buffalo, his work was exhibited at the gallery he had so loved as a child, the Albright Art Gallery. In 1956, the family moved back to the Cleveland area and Richard began teaching art at Lincoln West High School during the day while working toward his MA in art at Kent State in the evenings. Avis and Richard, with the help of an architect, designed their first home - a saltbox style house in Hudson, Ohio, and in 1958, their third son, Max (after Max Beckmann) was born. Richard enjoyed the consistency of teaching high school as well as the time it gave him to paint on the weekends and during the summer months. In 1961, he received his MA and his daughter, Claire, was born. With a fourth child, the house was much too small, and Avis and Richard began designing their second home. An admirer of MCM architecture, Richard’s favorite example of the style was the Farnsworth house – he often spoke of how the concepts behind this architectural style, particularly that of Mies van der Rohe, influenced his painting. Andres described himself as a 1950’s...

Birth, semi-abstract, modernist, somewhat surrealist, vintage 1943 painting of a female figure giving birth by Colorado artist, Charles Ragland Bunnell, painted during the artist's B...

"Forest" is a 29 x 36 inches, oil on canvas painting by American modernist, female artist Peter Miller. The work is painted in a vibrant color palette. The work is estate stamped on ...

Vintage American modernist cubist abstract painting. Watercolor gouache and pastel on board. Unsigned. Framed. Image size, 11"L x 11"H.

Gouache on paper, 18 7/8 x 14 3/4 in. Signed (at lower right): Morris; (with monogram, on the back): GLKM [monogram] / 1932 [sic] Executed circa late 1940s A passionate advocate of abstract art during the 1930s and 1940s, George L. K. Morris was active as a painter, sculptor, editor, and critic. An erudite man with an internationalist point of view, Morris eschewed the social, political, and figural concerns that preoccupied so many artists of Depression-era America, believing that painters should focus their attention on the beauty, refinement, and simplicity of pure form instead. His goal, he said, was “to wedge the expression further and further into the confines of the canvas until every shape takes on a spatial meaning” (as quoted in Ward Jackson, “George L. K. Morris: Forty Years of Abstract Art,” Art Journal 32 [Winter 1972–73], p. 150). Born into an affluent family in New York City, Morris was a descendent of General Lewis Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. From 1918 until 1924, he attended the Groton School in Connecticut, studying classics and art. He continued to focus on literature and art while attending Yale University (1924–28), an experience that prepared him well for his future activity as an artist-critic. After graduating in 1928, Morris studied at the Art Students League of New York, working under the realist painters John Sloan and Kenneth Hayes Miller, as well as Jan Matulka, the only modernist on the faculty. In the spring of 1929, Morris traveled to Paris with Albert E. Gallatin, a family friend and fellow painter who introduced him to leading members of the Parisian avant-garde, including Jean Arp, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Hélion, and Piet Mondrian. Morris also took classes at the Académie Moderne, studying under Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant, important exponents of Synthetic Cubism who influenced his aesthetic development. Indeed, after experimenting with the simplified forms of Modernism for a few years, Morris moved on to abstraction by 1934, adopting a hard-edged, geometric approach inspired by Leger’s cubist style and the biomorphic shapes of Arp and Joan Miró. Following his return to New York in 1930, Morris built a white-walled, open-spaced studio (inspired by that of Ozenfant, which had been designed by Le Corbusier) on the grounds of Brockhurst, his parents’ 46-acre estate in Lenox, Massachusetts. In 1935, he married the painter and collagist Estelle “Suzy...

Mid Century Hawaiian Symbolism -- Stairway to Destiny Symbolic figurative abstract with climbing stairway in bright spring colors by Marguerite Loui...

Born in Hungary, Bisttram went on to become a prolific artist creating many thousands of paintings and drawings that embraced styles from realism through abstraction. A member of the WPA, he was best known as one of the founders of Transcendental Art...

Vintage American school modernist painting. Oil on canvas, circa 1940. Unsigned. Image size, 30L x 24H. Housed in a period frame.

Otto Tschumi * 4.8.1904 Bern, † 18.2.1985 Bern) Weite Landschaft (Wide Landscape) A fine surrealist landscape • Mixed media: gouache, tempera, pencil on paper ca. 15 x 19 cm • Shabby chic gilt 19thC frame most likely chosen by the artist himself . 16.5 x 20.5 cm • Signed and dated (19)43 bottom left • Verso: In pencil titled, dated and re-signed by the artist Worldwide shipping is complimentary - There are no additional charges for handling & delivery. Swiss painter Otto Tschumi, considered one of the most important Swiss surrealists, was born on the 4th of August 1904 in Bittwil, Seeberg, Switzerland and died on the 18th February 1985 in Bern. Tschumi grew up in modest circumstances in Bern and attended basic school there. He then ended his apprenticeship as a sign painter...

Estate stamped and accompanied by a COA from the estate. Gouache on paper This is an early abstraction by Price, painted while he was in Woodstock, ...

Estate stamped and accompanied by a COA from the estate. Early abstraction ala Gorky. The history of the New York School painters is still being written, but Price earned a well-deserved place from the beginning. Price was one of the youngest of the first generation Abstract Expressionist circle of painters working in New York after WWII. Though only in his late twenties he began exhibiting in 1948 in New York at Hugo, Bodely, Iolas and Egan galleries. In a 1949, showing at Peridot galleries, Price was hailed for his breakthrough "Maze Series." A complex interweaving of organic shapes, automatic in nature and sometimes resembling bones or body parts, the "Maze" paintings exuded a pulsating energy that brought him critical acclaim. He received rave reviews in Art Digest, the New York Times and the New York Tribune. Price's earliest work was biomorphic or surrealist in nature, influenced by the automatism of Andre Breton and his school. By 1946, his work began to move away from this style to an all-over, decentralized style which became the "Maze" works and ultimately AbEx works which saw their culmination in the "Black Warrior" series. When the "Club" was started, Price was invited to join and forged close relationships with other members of the New York School including Fritz Bultman, Giorgio Cavallon, Weldon Kees, Bradley Walker Tomlin...

FRANCISCO BORES Spanish, 1898 - 1972 STILL LIFE OF FRUITS signed "Borès 45´" (lower right) oil on cardboard 15-3/4 x 19-3/4 (40 x 50 cm.) framed: 18-1/4 x 22-1/8 inches (46 x 56 cm.) PROVENANCE Private French Collector Francisco Bores López (Madrid, May 5, 1898 - Paris, May 10, 1972) was a Spanish painter of the so-called New School of Paris. His artistic training originated both in the Cecilio Pla painting academy, where he met Pancho Cossío, Manuel Ángeles Ortiz or Joaquín Peinado...

Vintage American modern abstract oil painting. Oil on canvas, circa 1960. Unsigned. Image size, 48L x 36H. Unframed.

Antique American modernist landscape painting signed "Welch '42". Oil on board, circa 1942. Signed. Image size, 16L x 14H. Housed in a modern frame.

Oil on board Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him, Rolph Scarlett more than once proved to be at the artistic zeit...

Estate stamped and accompanied by a COA from the estate. The history of the New York School painters is still being written, but Price earned a well-deserved place from the beginnin...

Abstract Work on Paper Mid-Century Modernism Greek American Gouache Drawing. A modernist artist who emigrated to America from Greece in 1904, when he was fourteen years old, Jean Xceron is described as having a reputation as an artist that has mysteriously fallen into obscurity---especially since he was reportedly quite prominent during his lifetime. However, a partial explanation of that omission is the fact that many of his papers and early records have been lost. He was a painter of biomorphic abstractions and did collages, which were influenced by Dadaism. Xceron was active in New York City when modernism was gaining influence. Of him during this period, it was written that his artistic role was "a vital link between what is commonly termed as the first-generation (the Stieglitz group, the Synchromists, etc.) and second-generation, the American Abstract Artists, the Transcendental Painting...

Sir Terry Frost (1915-2003) Bottle and Statue Oil on board 38 x 46cm A distinctive still life featuring bottle, statue, and drapery. Terry Frost was a prominent British abstract ar...